Eric D. Williams: Holocaust Denier

Shoah-shirker Williams, author of the twisted tome The Puzzle of Auschwitz

Eric Williams does not want to be known as a Holocaust denier. After my interview with him for an item in this week's Bird column titled "Deniers Conference," in which I expose his views as written in his self-published tome The Puzzle of Auschwitz, he posted a free pdf of the book online at his site www.whatreallyisthematrix.com, along with a "disclaimer" stating that, "I am not a holocaust denier." But in the same disclaimer, he writes, "...first, and foremost, it is [a] well known fact that the numbers of the 6 million Jews said have been killed in Concentration Camps have come down to around 1 million. "

This would come as news to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, the ADL, and just about every legitimate historian of the Holocaust and 20th Century European history alive. The Wiesenthal Center's senior researcher Aaron Breitbart has compiled a list of the most common Holocaust denier arguments and posted answers to them here, at SWC's Museumof Tolerance online. One of these entries has to do with what deniers call the "exaggerated" figure of six million Jews killed. Here's a quote:

The 6 million figure can be demonstrated by comparing Europe's Jewish population before and after the war. Even after making allowances for those who fled Europe and others who could be expected to die due to natural causes, there are nearly 6,000,000 people who cannot be accounted for.

Authentic German documents confirm the slaughter of Jews in the millions. The famous "Korherr Report,"(named after Richard Korherr, chief statistician for the SS) puts the number of Jewish losses at more than 2,454,000 by the end of 1942 alone. The war in Europe would not end until May, 1945.

The Anglo-American Commission of Enquiry, meeting in April 1946, put the total Jewish Holocaust losses at 5,721,500. On the basis of wartime statistical reports on ghettos, concentration camps and mass murder operations carried out by the Nazis, historian and international jurist, Jacob Robinson, arrived at a figure of 5,820,960. German historian, Helmut Krausnick, put the number of Jewish losses nearer to seven million. While the exact figure will never be known, scholars of the Holocaust find the rounded-off figure of six million to be in line with all the evidence.

When I spoke to Williams for my column item, he informed me that he has no degree in history, nor does he speak German. Actually, he related that his college degree was in business management. So by what expertise is he empowered to write a book about Auschwitz, I wonder? His expertise is self-developed, apparently. And his keen powers of observation have lead him to discount the testimony of Holocaust survivors, Nazi documents detailing the Final Solution, the photographs -- sometimes by the Nazis themselves -- from the camps and elsewhere of Jews being mistreated and murdered, and film footage from the liberated camps.

Instead, Williams takes as gospel the findings of Fred A. Leuchter, a hero to neo-Nazis worldwide, whose so-called Leuchter Report on the use of the poison Zyklon B has been thoroughly discredited. Errol Morris' acclaimed documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. reveals Leuchter to be a fool, whose tests on the walls and bricks of Auschwitz were ultimately disowned even by the chemist who performed them.

Williams dismisses as "total nonsense" the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz. He refers to Auschwitz as a "reconstructed theme park," and in a particularly repugnant chapter, states that he does not believe the so-called Operation Reinhard camps of Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec ever existed. He sums up the chapter dealing with these camps with this rhetorical query:

Do I really need to continue to show that these Operation Reinhard Death Camps of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor were nothing more than crafted propaganda to ensure the momentum of an agenda?

And this is a guy who says he's not a Holocaust denier. The DC Holocaust Memorial Museum's Web site states that, "More than 1.7 million Jews were gassed (by carbon monoxide in gas chambers) at the Aktion Reinhard camps by October 1943. Only about 120 people survived these three camps."

Allow me to quote from Emory University's Holocaust Denial on Trial site, which deals extensively with Holocaust denier David Irving's libel suit in England against Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Lipstadt defeated Irving in court, and this site includes an enormous amount evidence contradicting the claims of deniers. But it's this definition that I'm most interested in right now:

Holocaust denial is a political movement which denies the three basic foundational facts of the Holocaust, agreed to by credible historians around the world:

1) that approximately 6 million Jews were killed,

2) that they were killed purposefully as part of the Nazi's "final solution," and

3) that the Nazis killed many of their victims in gas chambers.

By all three of these dictates, Williams is a Holocaust denier. I do not know how he can avoid the label having written what he has.

The reason why I wrote about Williams this week in The Bird is that he's the organizer of this 9/11 Accountability Conference to take place at the end of February in Chandler, AZ. These "9/11 deniers" believe that the 9/11 attacks were caused by our own government or by some conspiracy so convoluted that they can barely explain it. Williams, it seems, believes that Holocaust history is the propaganda of the international Zionist conspiracy, and assorted other usual suspects, like the Freemasons and the Catholic church. Is the leap between these two -- Holocaust denial and 9/11 denial -- that broad? Not according to Williams.

"If we accept that we have not been told the truth about 9/11, why do we only stop questioning the official story of 9/11?" asks Williams in his online disclaimer. "Days after the events of September 11, 2001, I have questioned everything, including the Holocaust."

Hey, why stop with the Holocaust? Maybe Williams could write a book denying that slavery existed in the antebellum South. Or that the Cold War ever happened. Perhaps he could argue that the moon landing was faked. That the Earth is hollow. That Hitler is alive and well and commanding UFOs from the North Pole. That Bigfoot roams the Pacific Northwest. And so on. Actually, if he gets that far down the kook line, it'll be cute. At this point, with Holocaust and 9/11 denial, his arguments are sinister and pernicious, but no less unhinged than those of the Flat Earth Society.